Archive for July 21st, 2012

It’s no secret that I don’t like Zack Snyder’s films. Watchmen was good, but missed the point of the comics in several ways, and 300 and Sucker Punch were both pretty, brain-dead slogs for me. Clearly, he has his fans. (I’m told Dawn of the Dead doesn’t do this, but haven’t bothered to see it yet.) And yet every one of their trailers was pretty great. The teaser trailer(s) for Man of Steel is no exception in that regard.

I’m honestly surprised, though: it’s not just AWESOME cranked up to 11. It feels mature. It feels grown-up. It looks grounded in reality (or as grounded in reality as a film about a man who can fly can get). Its tone is… really kind of beautiful. The presence of red and blue and nearly every shot of the trailer, all presumably from footage before Clark takes on the cape, is clever (and far more subtle than that sounds).

It’s easy to assume producer Christopher Nolan had some influence with that, but I think that would be unfair to Mr. Snyder. Still, his trailers have been good before, and his films… less good, so I don’t want to get my hopes up too much for a great Superman film. We’ll see next year.

The footage in both of these teasers is identical (I think), but the voiceovers are different, so check them both out:

Yeah, yeah, shades of Bridesmaids. But this is darker and meaner and has a really strong cast: Kirsten Dunst, Lizzy Caplan, and Isla Fisher star as a trio of horrible, horrible women whose ex-hot friend (Rebel Wilson) gets married, and the three reluctantly? bitchily? go along for the ride. Hilarity ensues — or, at least, that’s the idea.

Kyle Bornheimer, Hayes MacArthur, James Marsden, and Adam Scott star in writer-director Leslye Headland’s film, which opens on September 7th after a VOD premier in August.

The synopsis (much of which you can pick up from the trailer) follows, after the break:(more…)